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Significant Bits

Significant Bits

Hosted by Josh Bleecher Snyder

TechnologyEducationInterviews guests

Episodes

7

Latest episode

Jul 2025

Language

EN

About the show

Substantive, in-depth technical conversations about software engineering (broadly construed).

Listen to episodes

7 recent
July 4, 2025Episode 656 min

Read/Write/Nil with Michael Knyszek and Michael Pratt

Please read important erratum at end of these notes!Astute listeners will notice that this is the first episode in over a year. I recorded not one but two awesome interviews...and then failed to edit and publish them. Guilt over this haunted me. I have finally accepted I must declare moral bankruptcy on this front to be able to continue the podcast; I apologize. (I may yet bring those episodes back to life, but I will no longer block on them.)In this episode, Michael, Michael, and I discuss an awesome debugging adventure deep in the Go runtime and linux kernel.Links:* Go issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/73581* Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s11-bronson.pdf* Sponsor: https://sketch.dev/Erratum:I described elided nil checks as working by mapping the page at 0x0 as read only. In fact, it is unmapped, so that reads will also fault. Silly me.

March 27, 2024Episode 535 min

Iota: whisper.cpp

Links:my little whisper.cpp bug fixwhy the logits were calculated inconsistentlywav2vec2 on arxiv and huggingfacethe openai whisper asr model announcementbeam search patiencetop notch guide to CTCthe bitter lesson (and in meme form)Errata:* I referred in the show to LLMs as encoder-decoder models. Most modern LLMs are decoder-only.* I messed up readability at Google. It means approvability, apparently. 🤷

February 15, 2024Episode 421 min

Iota: Random algorithms

In which I ramble about randomness and random algorithms. Now with theme music!Paper Cuts planned reading: Habitability and Piecemeal Growth, in Patterns of Software (just pages 7–16 of the book, which is pages 25-32 of the PDF)Selected links:* SIEVE cache replacement algorithm* Power of two random choices* Marc Brooker's blog* Random forests* Count Min Sketch* Monte Carlo Simulation* Random projection* T-Digest* The fix for my embarrassing compiler bug

February 5, 2024Episode 341 min

Write It Down with Shay Nehmad

Shay Nehmad on how writing is the key to becoming a better engineer, how to do it, and more.Links:* Cup O' Go podcast* Code Complete book* Shay's blog* Obsidian and Logseq

January 23, 2024Episode 236 min

Litestream and LiteFS with Ben Johnson

This was a fun and decidedly humbling conversation with Ben Johnson about SQLite, databases, Litestream, and LiteFS.Links:Ben on GitHubLitestreamLiteFS

December 31, 2023Episode 122 min

Iota: Rolling Hashes and FastCDC

No guest for this inaugural episode--just me this round.I cover the basics of rolling hashes and FastCDC, which appears to be the state of the art in content defined chunking.Mentioned in the episode:8 bit hash bugFastCDC paperPerkeep (once called Camlistore, oops)buprsyncI know the audio is slightly subpar (to say nothing of the content). But I think I know how to improve for next time. Finding my feet. :)Feedback welcome: josh@sigpod.dev

November 25, 20230 min

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The plan: Guests teach me substantive topics in software engineering, and I ask dumb questions.Please send guest suggestions, topic ideas, excitement, and monopoly money to josh@sigpod.dev

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